To me it is incomprehensible he did not fall in love. I know his reasons, indeed: in the first place, she had nothing; secondly, he had nothing, and school-debts to boot; thirdly, her genealogical tree was a boundary-tree and warning-post; fourthly, his hands were tied up by another nobler thought, which, for good cause, is yet reserved from the reader. Nevertheless—Fixlein! I durst not have been in thy place! I should have looked at her, and remembered her virtues and our school-years, and then have drawn forth my too fusible heart, and presented it to her as a bill of exchange, or insinuated it as a summons. For I should have considered that she resembled a nun in two senses, in her good heart and in her good pastry; that, in spite of her intercourse with male vassals, she was no Charles Genevieve Louise Auguste Timothé Eon de Beaumont,[37] but a smooth, fair-haired, white-capped dove; that she sought more to please her own sex than ours; that she showed a melting heart, not previously borrowed from the Circulating Library, in tears, for which in her innocence she rather took shame than credit.—At the very first cheapening, I should, on these grounds, have been out with my heart.—Had I fully reflected, Quintus! that I knew her as myself; that her hands and mine (to wit, had I been thou) had both been guided by the same Senior to Latin penmanship; that we two, when little children, had kissed each other before the glass, to see whether the two image-children would do it likewise in the mirror; that often we had put hands of both sexes into the same muff, and there played with them in secret; had I, lastly, considered that we were here standing before the glass-house, now splendent in the enamel of twilight, and that on the cold panes of this glass-house we two (she within, I without) had often pressed our warm cheeks together, parted only by the thickness of the glass,—then had I taken this poor gentle soul, pressed asunder by Fate, and seeing, amid her thunder-clouds, no higher elevation to part them and protect her than the grave, and had drawn her to my own soul, and warmed her on my heart, and encompassed her about with my eyes.
[37] See Schmelzle's Journey, [p. 284.]—Ed.
In truth, the Quintus would have done so too, had not the above-mentioned nobler thought, which I yet disclose not, kept him back. Softened, without knowing the cause—(accordingly he gave his mother a kiss)—and blessed without having had a literary conversation; and dismissed with a freight of humble compliments, which he was to disload on the morrow before the Dragoon Rittmeisterinn, he returned to his little cottage, and looked yet a long while out of its dark windows, at the light ones of the Castle. And then, when the first quarter of the moon was setting, that is, about midnight, he again, in the cool sigh of a mild, fanning, moist and directly heart-addressing night-breeze, opened the eyelids of a sight already sunk in dreaming....
Sleep, for today thou hast done naught ill! I, whilst the drooping shut flower-bell of thy spirit sinks on thy pillow, will look forth into the breezy night over thy morning footpath, which, through the translucent little wood, is to lead thee to Schadeck, to thy patroness. All prosperity attend thee, thou foolish Quintus!—
SECOND LETTER-BOX.
Frau von Aufhammer. Childhood-Resonance. Authorcraft.
The early piping which the little thrush last night adopted by the Quintaner from its nest, started for victual about two o'clock, soon drove our Quintus into his clothes; whose calender-press and parallel-ruler the hands of his careful mother had been, for she would not send him to the Rittmeisterinn "like a runagate dog." The Shock was incarcerated, the Quintaner taken with him, as likewise many wholesome rules from Mother Fixlein, how to conduct himself towards the Rittmeisterinn. But the son answered: "Mamma, when a man has been in company, like me, with high people, with a Fräulein Thiennette, he soon knows whom he is speaking to, and what polished manners and Saver di veaver (Savoir vivre) require."
He arrived with the Quintaner, and green fingers (dyed with the leaves he had plucked on the path), and with a half-nibbled rose between his teeth, in presence of the sleek lackeys of Schadeck.—If women are flowers,—though as often silk and Italian and gum-flowers as botanical ones,—then was Frau von Aufhammer a ripe flower, with (adipose) neck-bulb, and tuberosity (of lard). Already, in the half of her body, cut away from life by the apoplexy, she lay upon her lard-pillow but as on a softer grave: nevertheless, the portion of her that remained was at once lively, pious and proud. Her heart was a flowing cornucopia to all men, yet this not from philanthropy, but from rigid devotion: the lower classes she assisted, cherished and despised, regarding nothing in them, except it were their piety. She received the bowing Quintus with the back-bowing air of a patroness; yet she brightened into a look of kindliness at his disloading of the compliments from Thiennette.
She began the conversation, and long continued it alone, and said,—yet without losing the inflation of pride from her countenance: "She should soon die; but the god-children of her husband she would remember in her will." Farther, she told him directly in the face, which stood there all over-written with the Fourth Commandment before her, that "he must not build upon a settlement in Hukelum; but to the Flachsenfingen Conrectorate (to which the Bürgermeister and Council had the right of nomination), she hoped to promote him, as it was from the then Bürgermeister that she bought her coffee, and from the Town-Syndic (he drove a considerable wholesale and retail trade in Hamburg candles) that she bought both her wax and tallow lights."
And now by degrees he arrived at his humble petition, when she asked him sick-news of Senior Astmann, who guided himself more by Luther's Catechism than by the Catechism of Health. She was Astmann's patroness in a stricter than ecclesiastical sense; and she even confessed that she would soon follow this, true shepherd of souls, when she heard, here at Shadeck, the sound of his funeral-bell. Such strange chemical affinities exist between our dross and our silver veins; as, for example, here between Pride and Love: and I could wish that we would pardon this hypostatic union in all persons, as readily as we do it in the fair, who, with all their faults, are nevertheless by us,—as, according to Du Fay, iron, though mixed with any other metal, is, by the magnet,—attracted and held fast.